Prime example of how media narrative ruins politics

People can scream and wail about tax increases, even if they don’t realize that their own actual taxes have dropped by $400-800/year.

Actually, the tax cut was, by design, hard to notice. Faced with evidence that people were more likely to save than spend the tax rebate checks they received during the Bush administration, the Obama administration decided to take a different tack: it arranged for less tax money to be withheld from people’s paychecks.

They reasoned that people would be more likely to spend a small, recurring extra bit of money that they might not even notice, and that the quicker the money was spent, the faster it would cycle through the economy.

Economists are still measuring how stimulative the tax cut was. But the hard-to-notice part has succeeded wildly.

This is what worries me about biased media (both directions). People are going to vote based on incorrect notions, which subverts democracy itself. Our system is hinged upon an educated population, which just ain’t happening any more.

That said, it shows where the Obama administration’s priorities lie: helping the country, not doing what’s politically advantageous. Giving Americans an invisible extra $65/mo isn’t going to get too much attention come the ballot box, but it actually helped the damn economy.

You know how Bush kept saying that history would judge him? I’m starting to wonder if it won’t be another 15-20 years before all of the Obama administration’s accomplishments really surface.

And that’s just it. They think that because our media keeps saying either he’s destroying America with communist policies (right-wing media) or that he hasn’t done anything he promised (left-wing media). All because he apparently isn’t doing what’s flashy and obvious.

Meanwhile, we’re slowly going to start seeing policies that DO benefit the US.